Intrusion by Ken MacLeod Read Free Book Online Page A

herself dazzled by the sunlight off the remaining white snow on the pavements. By luck she had her work glasses with her – she’d snatched up the case and stuck it in her cagoule pocket in a moment of irritation when Nick’s hand crept towards the forbidden gadget once too often – and she slipped them on.
    Instantly the street changed. Everything was tagged: houses with their occupiers, floor by floor; vehicles with their drivers’ names, shops with advertisements and reviews and supply chains, pedestrians with their IDs. Irritated, Hope blinked away the app. As she walked around Tesco similar tags kept popping up again. She was amused by the food miles and carbon counts – how on earth had these apps hung around? – but the relevant ones were no less annoying, nagging and wheedling, and in the end she just put the glasses away until she’d finished her shopping. At the checkout she put them back on to have a look at the news and mags. She selected
The Economist
,
Marie Claire
and
Psychologies
, and added the downloads to her tab as she bagged the groceries.
    She lugged the bags home, and left the glasses firmly on the table until she’d made the beds and washed up the breakfast things. Then she made a coffee, cast off her apron and sat back, glasses on, for a half-hour of alternating self-indulgence and self-improvement. The former involved scoping out the spring fashions and wincing at their prices. The latter required skimming the serious articles. Something was wrong with bananas. Scientists at CERN had detected tachyon effects in a suspension of rhodopsin derivatives. The results were disputed. Brazil was hot. The Naxals had cooked up some kit that countered rust spray. There were ten good ways to have sex. The two women’s mags had nothing about the nature kids issue, but
The Economist
did. Two columns of legal reasoning about the Kasrani case argued that the family court’s decision was perverse, and should and most likely would be overturned onappeal. Hope found this so encouraging that she posted the link to ParentsNet before starting work.
    The science bit, whose name was Geena – officially Evangelina – Fernandez (a name very useful to have on your ID card, as was the cross on the silver chain around her neck, if your skin was as dark and hair as black as hers, and especially useful when the cops were looking for Naxals, as they usually were when they stopped her in the street), read the same
Economist
article with her first coffee and paracetamol of the day. The article had been snagged by the Institute for Science Studies’ overnight keyword trawl. The trawl was so undiscriminating that it had hooked her own piece in
Memo
a couple of days earlier, in among the haul from
Nature
and
PLoS
and the
TLS
and the
Journal of Synthetic Biology
. Under the
Economist
article was a list of links to it, close to the top of which – Geena was intrigued to see – was the root of a long thread on ParentsNet, posted by one Hope Morrison. Geena summoned databases to her glasses, and saw that Mrs Morrison was the mother of a nature kid, not registered as a conscience exemption, and pregnant again.
    Interesting, Geena thought. The Kasrani couple, although their dispute had given her the hook for her own article, had struck her as unlikely to last long as a synecdoche for the issue. It was too entangled with other matters: family law, immigration, even Iran, a country whose militant secularism and indeed militant everything made relations with it awkward even for the US, let alone Britain. Whereas Morrison’s case – if it everbecame a case – had a test-tube simplicity. The variable was isolated, the question clear.
    The question, as it self-assembled in Geena’s brain, was not one about rights. Rights, to Geena as to those who had taught her, were an emergent phenomenon of social practices, which themselves arose out of certain material requirements, which … but you know how it goes. No, the question was: is